Paula Vogel

Plays by Paula Vogel

A darkly satirical play written at the height of the AIDS crisis. As a young woman is diagnosed with a mysterious new illness, she and her beloved brother flee to Europe in search of a cure … and to escape the pain and uncertainty of the future.

Balmy evenings in rural Maryland are fraught with danger, and seductions can happen anywhere from a river bank to the front seat of a car, where a young self-conscious girl is learning to drive. To Li’l Bit, the radio is the most important part of the car, but the pop music of the 50’s can never quite drown out the harrowing images in her mind.

Paula Vogel is an American playwright and teacher whose plays are often structured around fantasy and deal from a feminist perspective with human concerns such as domestic violence, molestation, AIDS and the non-traditional family. Her target is almost always a social system that pits the weak against the strong in a life dance that often ends tragically for the powerless. She was awarded the 1998 Pulitzer Prize for How I Learned to Drive, in which a young girl's sexual awakening at the hands of her uncle is compared to a driving lesson. Other plays include The Oldest Profession (1981), about a group of 70-ish prostitutes, and The Baltimore Waltz (1992), in which Vogel tackles AIDS and the hypocrisy of the government's response to a disease that is perceived as mostly affecting those outside the 'norm'. Domestic violence ends up in death for the women in Desdemona (1979) and Hot 'n' Throbbing (1992). from David A. Williams, The Continuum Companion to Twentieth Century Theatre, ed. Colin Chambers (London, 2002).